A quick look at ArcGIS Pro

One of my undergraduates was interested in incorporating a little more sophistication into an analysis he was conducting in Southeast Asia. The long and the short of it is that he has polygons and lines, and he wants to quantify the number of lines within certain distances of each polygon (i.e. 5km, 10km, 20km, etc.).

An example dataset looks like this:

This was rather small – 11,000 lines, and 120 polygons. There were a bunch of steps to perform, and I won’t take time to talk about it here. The most important step was to determine the distance between each line and each polygon that were within 5km of one another.

So, the first thing I did was to run the Generate Near Table tool to find the distance of every polygon to every line. In ArcGIS 10.1, this took 420 seconds – I was disappointed because we have much bigger datasets to worry about.

So, I decided to give it a shot in ArcGIS Pro (here is a screen shot):

The Generate Near Table in ArcGIS Pro ran in 17 seconds! That is 24x faster than ArcGIS 10.1. I’m going to be running some more tests on this over the summer and will report on what I find. Next Fall, in my GIS Programming class, our undergraduates are going to write Arcpy scripts in both 10.1 and ArcGIS Pro, and we will show you the results.